Objective: Our objective is to describe how software engineering might benefit from an evidence-based approach and to identify the potential difficulties associated with the approach. Method: We compared the organisation and technical infrastructure supporting evidence-based medicine (EBM) with the situation in software engineering. We considered the impact that factors peculiar to software engineering (i.e. the skill factor and the lifecycle factor) would have on our ability to practice evidence-based software engineering (EBSE). Results: EBSE promises a number of benefits by encouraging integration of research results with a view to supporting the needs of many different stakeholder groups. However, we do not currently have the infrastructure needed for widespread adoption of EBSE. The skill factor means software engineering experiments are vulnerable to subject and experimenter bias. The lifecycle factor means it is difficult to determine how technologies will behave once deployed. Conclusions: Software engineering would benefit from adopting what it can of the evidence approach provided that it deals with the specific problems that arise from the nature of software engineering.

The ruling is terrible through and through. First off, it insists that the comments on the news story were clearly “hate speech” and that, as such, “did not require any linguistic or legal analysis since the remarks were on their face manifestly unlawful.” To the court, this means that it’s obvious such comments should have been censored straight out. That’s troubling for a whole host of reasons at the outset, and highlights the problematic views of expressive freedom in Europe. Even worse, however, the Court then notes that freedom of expression is “interfered with” by this ruling, but it doesn’t seem to care — saying that it is deemed “necessary in a democratic society.”

This is going to have massive chilling effects. Terrible ruling from the ECHR.

In the wake of this judgment, the legal situation is complicated. In an e-mail to Ars, T J McIntyre, who is a lecturer in law and Chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, the lead organization that won an important victory against EU data retention in the Court of Justice of the European Union last year, explained where things now stand. “Today’s decision doesn’t have any direct legal effect. It simply finds that Estonia’s laws on site liability aren’t incompatible with the ECHR. It doesn’t directly require any change in national or EU law. Indirectly, however, it may be influential in further development of the law in a way which undermines freedom of expression. As a decision of the Grand Chamber of the ECHR it will be given weight by other courts and by legislative bodies.”

We used three key principles in designing our datacenter networks: We arrange our network around a Clos topology, a network configuration where a collection of smaller (cheaper) switches are arranged to provide the properties of a much larger logical switch. We use a centralized software control stack to manage thousands of switches within the data center, making them effectively act as one large fabric. We build our own software and hardware using silicon from vendors, relying less on standard Internet protocols and more on custom protocols tailored to the data center.